GENRE PAINTERS

IT is quite in accordance with the tendencies displayed by these masters, that towards the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century an increasing number of artists preferred to devote their talent to recording the life of their own days to the endless repetition of the “grand-manner” subjects which had occupied the energy of the preceding generations. Thus Jean Alexis Grimou (1678–1740), who was Swiss by birth and entirely self-trained, introduced into French art the drinking scenes beloved of the Flemish masters. From his painting of A Drinker (No. 385) and the two Portraits of Young Soldiers (Nos. 386 and 387), it may be seen how little he was in sympathy with the official art of his time; this is scarcely to be wondered at, since, instead of undergoing the customary course of academic training, he had formed his style by copying the works of Rembrandt and other Northern masters.

Pierre Subleyras (1699–1749) was not quite so emancipated. In his large religious compositions he still follows the affectations of the grand style. His chief work of this kind is the Mass of St. Basil, at Sta. Maria degli Angeli in Rome, of which No. 857 at the Louvre is a reduced version. Of far more artistic significance are his small genre pieces, in which he attains to a rich quality of pigment and a justice of tone-values unique in French painting of his period. Subleyras is said to have been of Spanish descent; and there are in his scenes from La Fontaine’s “Fables”—notably in The Hermit (No. 862)—clear indications of his intimate acquaintance with Spanish art. The best of all his pictures at the Louvre is The Falcon (No. 861), which, apart from its general quality of tone, contains some still-life passages worthy of the brush of Chardin.

RAOUX AND DE TROY

Just as Subleyras should be judged by his genre scenes rather than by his scriptural subjects, so Jean Raoux’s (1677–1734) real significance lies in the intimate note he introduced into his fancy portraits, and not in his moderately successful excursions into mythology, like the Telemachus relating his Adventures to Calypso, at the Louvre (No. 764). The Young Woman reading a Letter (No. 765), in the La Caze Room, is perhaps the most charming of many similar pictures from his brush. In sentiment it belongs entirely to the amorous century of Louis xv., which was to produce a Fragonard and a Greuze. Raoux was one of the first French painters of contemporary life. Brought up in the old tradition, he was in his last years influenced by the personality of the great Watteau.

If Raoux was the somewhat sentimental painter of bourgeois life, Jean FranÇois de Troy (1679–1752) played not infrequently the chronicler of the elegant life of the leisured classes. Unfortunately this interesting phase of his art is not represented at the Louvre, which, besides the three Portraits (Nos. 886–888) in the La Caze collection, contains two of his famous designs for tapestry, representing scenes from the History of Esther (Nos. 884–885); and his large historical painting, The First Chapter of the Order of the Holy Ghost, held by Henri IV. in 1595 (No. 883).

WATTEAU

The master who was to break definitely with the cold, majestic, uninspired art of the seventeenth century, and who in leading French painting into new paths reached the very limits of poetic expressiveness imposed by material means, was Antoine Watteau (1684–1721). Born at Valenciennes six years before that city became French through the peace of Nymwegen, Watteau, the son of a poor Flemish tiler, was French, as it were, by accident only. In his early years, when he studied in his native town under GÉrin, a mediocre local painter, he must have had occasion to become closely acquainted with the paintings of the Flemish masters. On the death of GÉrin, in 1702, he went to Paris, where he became assistant to the scene-painter MÉtayer. Watteau suffered dire poverty, and completely undermined his health through privation before his talent attracted the attention of his next master, Claude Gillot, with whom he stayed until 1708, when he became assistant to Claude Audran, a decorative artist of great repute and Keeper of the Luxembourg collections. At the Luxembourg Palace he was enabled to study the masterpieces of Rubens, Titian, and Paolo Veronese, from which he benefited as much as from his work from nature in the Luxembourg gardens.

It was perhaps fortunate that he failed in the competition for the Prix de Rome in 1709, and was dissuaded from going to Italy. He was received by the Academy in 1717, when he painted his “diploma picture.” The Embarkation for the Island of Cythera (No. 982, Plate XXXIX.), which may be considered an epitome of his art. Sketchy as it is, this picture, which he painted in seven days, exceeds in poetic charm and in the beauty of its entrancing sparkle of mellow tones the more highly finished later version in the German Emperor’s collection. It is the most striking instance of a purely imaginary scene of unworldly happiness, tinged with that peculiarly Watteauesque vague melancholy,—the consumptive’s maladie de l’infini to which M. Mauclair has drawn attention,—represented with such absolute atmospheric truth as to make it appear an incomparably beautiful reality. Technically, this picture, like L’IndiffÉrent (No. 984) and La Finette (No. 985) in the La Caze Room, embodies in germ the theories which in the second half of the next century were scientifically worked out by the French Impressionists.

Some time in 1719 or 1720, Watteau was in England to consult a famous physician. But his illness took a turn for the worse, and he had to return to his native country. After six months spent in Paris, he went to live at Nogent-sur-Marne, where he died on July 18, 1721. Watteau’s influence upon eighteenth-century art was prodigious; but his work remained unapproached by any of his followers and imitators, who too often sacrificed artistic considerations to a desire to please the lascivious tastes of a corrupt, pleasure-loving society. The Faux Pas (No. 989) is one of the rare instances where Watteau allowed a certain suggestiveness to enter into his work; but even here “the smallness of the subject is swallowed up in the greatness of the painting.”

It is a strange fact that but for the generosity of La Caze, The Embarkation would be the only example at the Louvre of the greatest master produced by France. The reason for this extraordinary neglect may be found in the scant esteem in which Watteau was held until his eclipsed fame was resuscitated by the de Goncourts. The superb life-size painting of Gilles (No. 983), one of ten pictures by or attributed to Watteau in the La Caze collection, was sold at public auction in 1826 for £26; whilst L’IndiffÉrent and La Finette together realised the sum of £19 at the Marquis de MÉnars’ sale! Of the eleven pictures in the La Caze collection that were originally attributed to Watteau, L’Escamoteur (No. 622a, formerly No. 987) is now acknowledged to be by his imitator Philippe Mercier (1689–1760), who was born in Berlin of French parents, and spent the most productive years of his life in London, where he died in 1760. The still-life piece Dead Game (No. 993), officially assigned to Watteau, has rightly been doubted; but the aspersions thrown upon the authenticity of the delicious Pastoral (No. 992) do not seem sufficiently justified. The profound influence of Rubens upon Watteau’s art is nowhere more pronounced than in the sketch The Judgment of Paris (No. 988), and in the beautiful oval composition Jupiter and Antiope (No. 991), which has, however, also much in common with Titian. The superb nude figure symbolising Autumn (No. 990), and another fÊte galante, entitled Gay Company in a Park (No. 986), are no less creditable to the master’s genius.

WATTEAU’S FOLLOWERS

Although Watteau indicated the direction that French art was to follow in a century when it had to cater no longer for the stateapartment but for the boudoir, he left no follower worthy to carry on his tradition. Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743), who had studied under Dulin and Gillot, based his style upon Watteau, whom he almost rivalled as a draughtsman. But he was an inferior colourist, and wholly lacking in poetic inspiration. One has only to compare his Actors of the Italian Comedy (No. 470) with Watteau’s Gilles (No. 983), or his Music Lesson (No. 468) and Innocence (No. 469) with their prototypes created by that master, to realise the inferiority of these thin, vulgarised versions of Watteau subjects.

Jean Baptiste Pater (1695–1736), who, like Watteau, was born at Valenciennes, became a pupil of his fellow-townsman in Paris, and benefited considerably by his guidance. Although inferior as a draughtsman to Lancret, whom he did not rival either in originality, he far surpassed him as a colourist. With Lancret, colour was generally an afterthought; with Pater, it entered into the primary conception of the picture. His Academy diploma piece, the FÊte ChampÊtre (No. 689), is painted in the Watteau manner with true pictorial feeling, even if it lacks the master’s precious, jewel-like quality of pigment. The FÊte ChampÊtre (No. 203), by Bonaventure Debar (1700–1729), holds promise of a considerable talent in a similar direction, cut short by a premature death.

THE VAN LOO FAMILY

No fewer than five members of the Flemish Van Loo family, which flourished in France from about 1660 until the death of Julius CÆsar Van Loo in 1821, are represented in the Louvre collection. The most distinguished among them were Louis Van Loo’s sons, Jean-Baptiste and Charles AndrÉ, better known as Carle. Both of them were brought up in the academic tradition; but their Flemish blood and the taste of a time that had seen the master-work of Watteau, gave their art more vigour and sensuousness than is to be found in the paintings of their academic precursors. Still it is unnecessary to linger over their historical and mythological compositions. The picture which does most credit to Carle Van Loo (1705–1765) is The Hunt Picnic (No. 899), which, in spite of a certain crudeness of colour, attracts by the science of the composition, the Watteau feeling of the landscape background, and by its fascinating reality as a record of contemporary life among the leisured, pleasure-loving classes.

FranÇois Le Moine (1688–1737) constitutes a link between the decorative style of the preceding generation, which had become dull and ponderous, and the art of Watteau and his followers. In this position he heralds his great pupil FranÇois Boucher, whose characteristics, deprived of his elegant grace and suave rhythm of design, are more than hinted at in the Juno, Iris and Flora (No. 536). The Olympus (No. 535), the sketch for a ceiling, recalls in its joyful decorative colour and bravura of brush work the art of Tiepolo and Ricci.

FRANÇOIS BOUCHER

Whilst such painters as Jean Restout (1692–1768) still continued to follow the tradition of the Bolognese eclectics, as may be seen in his Herminia and the Shepherd (No. 775), the art of the Louis xv. period was given its final stamp by FranÇois Boucher (1703–1770). This favourite of Mme. de Pompadour, having gained the Prix de Rome in 1723, went to Italy in 1727, whence he returned to Paris four years later. At the age of thirty his Rinaldo and Armida (No. 38a) caused him to be “received” by the Academy—the first of many honours that fell to his share, as he became in turn First Painter to the King, Director of the Academy, and Inspector of the Beauvais Tapestry Manufactory. He was the ideal painter of the age that was dominated by the personality of the Pompadour, who kept him employed with commissions for the decoration of her boudoir. Boucher was the true child of his time—licentious, pleasure-loving, light-hearted, and without moral scruples. The astonishing thing is that his pursuit of pleasure did not affect his enormous productivity. His art is in perfect harmony with his character—frankly sensual, exuberant, and unreliable; at times rising to superb decorative splendour of the airy, graceful type demanded by his patrons, and then again careless to the point of slovenliness.

Boucher was not a great colourist in the sense in which this term is applied to masters like Titian or Rubens. Indeed, more often than not his application of purely local colours unaffected by their surroundings is apt to result in the crudeness noticeable in his Pastoral (No. 33), and in the domestic scene called The Breakfast (No. 50a). Other pictures like the Pastoral (No. 34) owe their present tapestry-like mellowness to the fading of the pigments. But it would be unfair to disregard the artist’s intention and to judge his capacity as a colourist from the present appearance of his works at the Louvre or in their usual environment in a public gallery. They were intended for definite decorative purposes, and in their proper Louis xv. setting fulfilled their function in admirable fashion. Few artists excelled Boucher in rhythmic harmony of composition, although it must be confessed that his emphatic insistence on triangular design is apt to become monotonous. This predilection is to be noted in the Rinaldo and Armida (No. 38a), Venus disarming Cupid (No. 44), The Rape of Europa (No. 39), the Pastorals (Nos. 33, 34, and 35), Vulcan presenting Arms to Venus (No. 36, Plate XL.), and, indeed, in the vast majority of his twenty-two exhibited pictures at the Louvre. His mastery in flesh painting is best illustrated by the more unconventionally designed Diana leaving the Bath (No. 30), and the brilliant sketch of The Three Graces (No. 47) in the La Caze Room. Among his other masterpieces at the Louvre, Venus demanding Arms from Vulcan (No. 31), which like No. 36 was designed for execution in tapestry, and the charming Portrait of a Young Woman (No. 50), deserve special attention. It is unfortunate that they are not hung in the rooms that contain the magnificent furniture of the period, instead of being piled sky-high among pictures that seem to be primarily regarded by the officials as mere museum specimens of the art of painting. Boucher is better hung, and so may be much more effectively studied in the Wallace collection in London.

A little drier in touch than Boucher’s nudes, and considerably less coherent in design, but still painted with remarkable ability, are the figures of the goddess and her attendants in The Triumphs of Amphitrite (No. 863), by Boucher’s contemporary, Hugues Taraval (1728–1785).

SIMÉON CHARDIN

If Boucher and the army of painters of fÊtes galantes and boudoir decorations reflect the tastes of the corrupt society of Louis xv.’s age, Jean-Baptiste SimÉon Chardin (1699–1779) is the painter par excellence of the lower bourgeoisie. His was an uneventful, colourless life of unremitting work after the completion of his studies under Cazes and N. N. Coypel. He never went to Rome; he never sought after distinction in the “grand manner”; he never hankered after Court patronage. He simply devoted himself to recording with the utmost technical perfection the peaceful and domestic life of the lower middle class, to which he himself belonged, with all his tastes and habits of life, and to the painting of still-life, in which branch of art he stands without a rival. There are among his thirty-two pictures at the Louvre twenty paintings of Still-life (Nos. 89, 90, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 105–116, and the doubtful No. 118), all equally remarkable for their inimitable skill in the rendering of the most varied textures and reflections; for subtle observation of the mutual effect of coloured objects upon each other through the interchange of coloured rays; and, above all, for that “sense of intimacy, of life behind the scene,” with which he knew how to invest even inanimate objects.

This same sense of intimacy and of absolute pictorial unity is also the great merit of his domestic genre pieces, into which enters, in addition, the element of spiritual unity, of the absorption of each person in his or her occupation. In the deservedly famous Grace before Meat, at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, of which the Louvre owns two admirable replicas (No. 92, Plate XLI., and No. 93), the most casual observer cannot fail to notice that intimate bond between the mother and the two children, which gives the impression of a scene accidentally overlooked, without anybody being aware of the intruder’s presence. La MÈre laborieuse (No. 91), La Pourvoyeuse (No. 99), and even the cat in the still-life piece The Cat in the Larder (No. 89), are equally innocent of “posing,” and absorbed in their respective occupations. The Boy with the Top (No. 90a) and the Young Man with the Violin (No. 90b), under which titles we have the portraits of the two children of the jeweller Charles Godefroy, were bought by the Louvre in 1907 for £14,000. These two pictures and the Castle of Cards (No. 103) are sufficient to establish Chardin’s supremacy in child portraiture.

FRAGONARD

Chardin for but a few months, and Boucher for two years, were the masters who taught Jean HonorÉ Fragonard (1732–1806) before, having gained the Prix de Rome in 1752 and worked three years under Van Loo, he set out for Rome, where under Natoire’s guidance he applied himself to the copying of old masters. More important for the formation of his style were the sketches he made in the company of his friend Hubert Robert in the romantic gardens of the Villa d’Este, and the deep impression created upon his mind by Tiepolo’s decorative paintings in Venice, which city he visited before his return to Paris in 1761. He scored his first great success in 1765 with the large and still somewhat academic composition Coresus and CalirrhoË (No. 290), which was bought by Louis xv. for 24,000 livres for reproduction at his tapestry works.

Patronised by Mme. du Barry, the dancer Marie Guimard, and other priestesses of Venus, Fragonard now devoted his exceptionally facile and spontaneous talent to subjects that in licentious frivolity, voluptuousness, and suggestiveness had never been equalled even by his master Boucher. It is only his marvellous technique, ranging from the liquid transparency of his swift oil sketches to the rich luminous impasto of the Sleeping Bacchante (No. 294); from the elegant arabesque of the Bathing Women (No. 293), so full of joie de vivre and youthful fire, to the almost brutal strength of the portrait of a writer or poet, known under the title of Inspiration (No. 298). But in all these, as well as in the charming Music Lesson (No. 291, Plate XLII.), The Student (No. 297) and the Young Woman (No. 300), Fragonard proves himself one of the greatest colourists produced by the French School. It was Fragonard’s sad fate to outlive his fame, to witness the collapse of the ancient rÉgime and the triumph of his pupil David’s classicism, and to die in obscurity and neglect.

GREUZE

Twenty-three paintings represent at the Louvre the art of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), who trod the safe path of flattering the taste of the multitude by the mawkish sentimentality of his genre-pieces and the prettiness and half-concealed sensuality of his “fancy portraits” of young women, which in their suggestiveness are perhaps more insidious than the frank improprieties of Boucher and Fragonard. The sentimental and melodramatic side of Greuze’s art is strikingly revealed in The Village Engagement (No. 369), in The Paternal Curse (No. 370), and in The Punished Son (No. 371), which aroused the enthusiasm of that singularly misguided critic Diderot. But it is the painting of pictures like The Broken Pitcher (No. 372, Plate XLIII.), The Milkmaid (No. 372a), and The Dead Bird (No. 372c; a replica of the picture in the Scottish National Gallery), that has made him the idol of a certain undiscriminating section of the public, and established him among the world’s most popular painters.

PORTRAIT PAINTERS

The leading position among the portrait painters of Louis xv.’s corrupt Court was occupied by Jean Marc Nattier (1685–1766), who was a good colourist, but was utterly lacking in sincerity, and placed his able brush at the service of the basest flattery. He has left a whole gallery of Court beauties posing as, and invested with the attributes of, Greek goddesses and allegorical personifications in the manner of the group of Mdlle. de Lambesc and the Comte de Brienne (No. 659) as Minerva preparing the hero for warlike exploits. The Magdalen (No. 657) is probably another contemporary portrait in fancy costume. His best picture at the Louvre is the Portrait of a Young Woman (No. 661a).

FranÇois Hubert Drouais (1725–1775), the painter of the group of the Comte d’Artois (afterwards Charles X.) and Madame Clotilde, afterwards Queen of Sardinia (No. 266), who received a good share of Court patronage, showed considerable ability when he had sufficient strength to resist the temptation to flatter his sitters. But unfortunately he too often followed the example of Nattier in this respect.

TOCQUÉ, VESTIER, AND LÉPICIÉ

A portrait painter of a very different stamp was Nattier’s son-in-law, Louis TocquÉ (1696–1772). Although he, too, was a favourite not only at the French, but also at the Russian and Danish Courts, the examples of his art at the Louvre suggest that he was but indifferently successful—from the artistic point of view—with his “official” portraits, like the portrait d’apparat of Marie Leczinska, Queen of Louis XV. (No. 867), or the affected Portrait of the Dauphin Louis at the age of ten (No. 868). On the other hand, when he was not weighed down by the importance of his task, he attained to a solidity of style, strength of character painting, and beauty of technique that place him at the head of the French portraitists of his period. TocquÉ was apparently never in England, but such masterpieces from his brush as the Mme. Danger embroidering (No. 868a), and the supposed portrait of Mme. de Graffigny (No. 869), show distinct affinity with Allan Ramsay and Hogarth, with superadded French finesse and suavity.

In the case of Antoine Vestier (1740–1824) the pronounced leaning towards the English style of the period is to be accounted for by that artist’s lengthy sojourn in England. The Portrait of a Young Woman (No. 961), in the La Caze Room, might on superficial inspection pass for a work of Francis Cotes. Even in the Portrait of the Painter’s Wife (No. 959), which was painted in 1787, long after Vestier’s return to his native country, the figure of a boy caressing a dog has a curiously English flavour.

Honesty of purpose and serious concern with artistic problems mark the art of Nicolas Bernard LÉpiciÉ (1735–1784), whose Portrait of Carle Vernet (549a) is a picture of precious quality. He devoted himself more particularly to the domestic genre, which he treated without the sentimentality and theatricality of a Greuze. Indeed, if there is any contemporary painter with whom he shows affinity, it is SimÉon Chardin. That he was a landscape painter of no mean ability may be gathered from his Farmyard (No. 549), which, in spite of the predominating brown, is remarkable for its luminous transparency.

Before turning to the landscape painters Joseph Vernet and Hubert Robert, we must close the chapter of eighteenth-century portraiture with Elisabeth Louise VigÉe Le Brun (1755–1842), since her art, although her life extended far into the nineteenth century, belongs essentially to the degenerate days of the ancien rÉgime—an art not devoid of grace, but exceeding in shallowness and insipidity the shallowest and most insipid productions of pre-Davidian days. Of the many masters from whom VigÉe, herself the daughter of a painter, received advice, Greuze appears to be the one with whom she was most in sympathy. Married at an early age to Le Brun, a painter and picture-dealer from whom she was divorced after many years of wretched conjugal life, her career, of which she has left a full account in her autobiography, was one of adventure and truly extraordinary professional success.

She was the favourite painter of Marie Antoinette, had to leave Paris during the Terror, and made an almost triumphal progress from Court to Court before she definitely settled in Paris in 1809. At Naples, Vienna, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, and other centres, Royalty and the world of fashion crowded to her studio; and her art even gained the unstinted approval of a judge like Sir Joshua Reynolds, which is the more surprising as VigÉe Le Brun’s colour was almost invariably cold and unsympathetic. Her personal charms may have been partly responsible for her universal success, if reliance is to be placed on the questionable honesty of her flattering brush from which the Louvre owns two Portraits of the Artist and her Daughter (No. 521 and No. 522, Plate XLIV.). Among her other pictures in the Louvre are the Peace bringing Abundance (No. 520), her reception piece at the Academy, and a portrait of her early friend and master, Joseph Vernet (No. 525).

One has to realise that the art of landscape painting had become almost extinct in France, and that the art of seascape had never existed, if one wishes to account for Diderot’s enthusiasm with regard to Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), which made him exclaim, “What pictures! He rivals the Creator in celerity, Nature in truth!” Our cooler judgment cannot so easily pass over all that is cold and formal in his art. But, taken in relation to his contemporaries, he deserves respect for his emotional attitude towards nature, for a sense of the dramatic that approaches Salvator Rosa’s, and for his admirable drawing of the figures introduced into his landscapes. Vernet’s love of the sea awoke when at the age of eighteen he journeyed to Rome, where he became imbued with the classic tradition. He only returned to Paris in 1752, and soon afterwards received from Louis xv. the commission to paint the large series of French Seaports (Nos. 940–954) which are now to be seen in the rooms in this collection given up to the MusÉe de Marine. In his other marines and landscapes (Nos. 912–939), not all of which are actually exhibited, he allowed his imagination freer play than in the Seaports, which were naturally of more topographic character.

Both his son Carle Vernet (1758–1836), a historical painter who excelled in the rendering of horses in movement, and his grandson Horace Vernet (1789–1863), a popular battle painter, are represented at the Louvre, the former by the Stag Hunt in the Forest of Meudon (No. 955), and the latter by the BarriÈre de Clichy (Defence of Paris in 1814) (No. 956), and the uninspired Judith and Holofernes (No. 957).

HUBERT ROBERT

Hubert Robert (1733–1808), of whose classic landscapes the collection contains nineteen examples (Nos. 797–815), was not, as might be imagined from the general character of his paintings, influenced by the art of Claude Lorrain, but derived his love of antique buildings and landscapes peopled with classic figures from the general atmosphere of archÆological enthusiasm engendered by the excavations on the site of Herculaneum, which prevailed in Rome when the young artist arrived at that Mecca of his profession in 1754. Robert lived and worked in Italy for twelve years, and became thoroughly imbued with this antiquarian spirit. Unlike Claude, he rarely, if ever, drew upon his imagination for the details of his classic landscapes, which are faithful transcripts of existing ruined or half-ruined buildings, though not infrequently they are arranged for greater pictorial effect. Of this half-realistic, half-classic nature—the introduction of people in classic garb among the ruins of buildings, which in classic times wore a very different aspect, is a pardonable anachronism—are the Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes (No. 799), and several similar pieces at the Louvre. In his smaller pictures, of which the best are the Fountain under a Portico (No. 812) and the Winding Staircase, with three Figures (No. 813), in the La Caze Room, he rivals the rich quality of pigment and mellow tone of Guardi at his best. Robert was Fragonard’s constant companion in Rome, and exercised considerable influence upon his friend, as may be seen from Fragonard’s landscape drawings.

There is scarcely a trace of Italian classicism in the superb View in the Neighbourhood of Paris (No. 650), by Louis Gabriel Moreau (1740–1806), which in its silvery-grey tonality, in its sense of atmosphere, and in the treatment of the receding distances, rather recalls the manner of the Dutchman Philips de Koninck. That Moreau, who also worked in England, was not always free from conventionality, is proved by the rather formal composition of the View of the Hills of Meudon from Saint-Cloud (No. 651).

The boudoir art of the ancien rÉgime came to a natural end through the great social upheaval of the Revolution, of which Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) is the very personification in the realm of painting. As a pupil of Boucher, David in his early years was essentially a child of the eighteenth century. That he became the founder and head of a new classicist school, as tyrannical in his sway as had been Le Brun during the reign of Louis xiv., was due to the teaching of Joseph Marie Vien, whom he accompanied to Rome in 1775, the year in which Vien was appointed Director of the École de Rome. Vien was an eclectic and a purist of greater ability than would appear from his two dull pictures at the Louvre, St. Germain and St. Vincent (No. 964) and The Sleeping Hermit (No. 965).

David’s participation in the events of the year 1789 and his ardent republicanism did not, as has often been stated, attract him to subjects from Republican Roman history. Indeed, he had already painted The Oath of the Horatii (No. 189) and The Lictors taking to Brutus the Corpse of his Sons (No 191), for Louis xvi., and was only following the current of taste in devoting himself to the study of the antique and to antiquarian research. These two pictures, in spite of their cold classicism and theatricality, met with sensational success on their first appearance at the Salon. It is not in such works as these, nor in the Rape of the Sabine Women (No. 188), compared with which even Poussin’s version of the same theme appears like a glimpse of actual life, that David’s talent found its happiest expression, but in the unaffected and irresistibly charming Portrait of Mme. RÉcamier (No. 199, Plate XLV.) reclining on an Empire sofa. Whatever this picture may owe to the sitter’s grace and beauty and to the fact that it was never finished, and thus retained the freshness of a sketch, it is certainly one of the most attractive masterpieces of the French school. Here, as in the group of Three Ladies of Ghent (No. 200a), in which the luminous quality of the fresh tones is enhanced by the general greyness of the scheme, we have the work of a real painter, whilst David’s bombastic historical compositions are scarcely more than tinted cartoons.

THE “CORONATION” PICTURE

When Napoleon rose to power, David became his favourite painter. The erstwhile Jacobin was chosen to paint the official Coronation picture (No. 202a), an enormous canvas, which, like most ceremonial pictures of this kind, has more historical than artistic significance. The lifelike portraiture of the numerous personages surrounding the central group of Napoleon placing the crown on Josephine’s head, is the chief point of interest. On the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, David was sent into exile. He died at Brussels in 1825; but his influence is reflected in official French art to this day. It was he who imposed upon the modern academic school a rigid canon of formal classic beauty which is fatal to evolution and progress, because it does not permit personal emotional expression.

Less severely classic in form, and showing at least an attempt at approaching a little nearer to truth than David, is the painting of the figures of The Three Graces (No. 769), by David’s rival, J. B. Regnault (1754–1829), in the La Caze collection. The worst type of academic art is represented in the bituminous reconstructions of classic antiquity by his pupil, P. N. GuÉrin (1774–1833), whose Return of Marcus Sextus (No. 393) enjoyed, perhaps owing to its supposed political allusion to the return of the emigrants, a success which cannot be accounted for on artistic grounds.

Among the numerous pupils and followers of David who rose to fame, honours, and wide popularity before Ingres became the acknowledged head of the official school, the most distinguished were GÉrard, Girodet, and Gros. Baron F. P. S. GÉrard (1770–1837), whilst following on the whole the principles laid down by his master, knew how to invest his work with more individual character, which stood him in particular good stead in his portraiture. That this was recognised by his contemporaries is proved by the fact that he became the portrait painter par excellence of the First Empire and the Bourbon restoration, although his inclination drew him towards allegory and mythology. There is undeniable distinction and fine characterisation in such portraits as The Painter Isabey and his Daughter (No. 332). The nature of the subject debarred him from showing the strongest side of his talent in the chillingly unemotional, but undeniably graceful, Psyche receiving Cupid’s First Kiss (No. 328), and in the Daphnis and ChloË (No. 329), which was bought in 1825 for £1000. They have their counterpart in the cold and antique French sculpture of the period.

A. L. Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (1767–1824) was of all David’s artistic progeny the one painter who devoted himself to the purely pictorial problem of concentrated light and shade, without, however, being able to free himself from the domination of linear design. The compromise of the two principles led to such unfortunate results as The Sleep of Endymion (No. 361) and The Burial of Atala (No. 362). In The Deluge (No. 360), which was painted later, he shows pronounced leanings towards a crude naturalism which exceeds in horror the most cruel inventions of Ribera’s genius.

Antoine Jean Gros (1771–1835), though a classicist by training, was forced by circumstances, and by the patronage of Napoleon who ennobled him, to devote his brush to an important phase of contemporary life—the glorification of his hero’s warlike achievements. He was by no means a realist; and although he followed Napoleon on many of his campaigns and presumably brought back with him rich material in sketches and vivid recollections, his forceful compositions accentuate the heroic aspect and the imaginative appeal of warfare, and are not spontaneous glimpses of actuality. The whole glamour of the Napoleonic legend is expressed in the group of wounded soldiers who, oblivious of their suffering, cheer their great captain in Napoleon at the Battle of Eylau (No. 389). The sense of the heroic is as pronounced in the large painting, Napoleon visiting the Plague-stricken at Jaffa (No. 388), in the Bonaparte at Arcole (No. 391), and even in the impressive Portrait of Lieutenant-General Fournier-SarlovÈze (No. 392a), silhouetted against a smoke-filled battlefield. A careful inspection of this large canvas shows pentimenti in the painting of the legs, of which the General seems now to have two pair! Gros’s weakness, like that of all David’s pupils, was his neglect of colour. His popularity waned rapidly after the fall of Napoleon. He became a victim to melancholia, and drowned himself in the Seine in 1835.

PIERRE PRUD’HON

Though not entirely detached from the ruling school of the period, Pierre Prud’hon (1758–1823) occupies a unique position among his contemporaries. Having absolved his preliminary studies at Dijon, he became the pupil of the old masters—of Correggio and Leonardo—first in Paris and then in Rome, where he worked for seven years before definitely settling at Paris in 1789. To his sympathy with the Italian masters he owed that mellowness of colour and understanding of chiaroscuro which escaped the grasp of the Davidists. He was a real painter as distinguished from the classicist draughtsmen of the official school. Even if it is impossible to share to-day the enthusiasm at one time evoked by the somewhat grotesque allegory, Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing Crime (No. 747), this picture, which was intended for the Palais de Justice, rises immeasurably above the average of the “imaginative” paintings produced by Prud’hon’s contemporaries.

Vastly superior as regards pictorial quality and the whole conception, is the Abduction of Psyche by Zephyrus (No. 756). In the Crucifixion (No. 744), his last picture, Prud’hon rises to telling dramatic effectiveness of colour, and heralds the advent of Delacroix. But the most masterly of his seventeen paintings at the Louvre is the magnificent Portrait of a Young Man (No. 753), which the Louvre was fortunate enough to secure for £35 in 1895. It is a strangely living evocation of a personality, searching, intimate, and mysterious—a portrait not so much of the superficial features, but of the inner life of the sitter. The large Portrait of the Empress JosÉphine (No. 751) suffers from comparison with this masterpiece. The pose is affected, the background dingy, and the red of the shawl introduces a harsh and disconnected note of colour.